Teradata & Tableau: "The best in their respective areas"

Teradata helps customers across the globe wring value from their big data. In this video, EMEA Product Manager Fawad Asrar Qureshi discusses why “it became quite apparent we had to work with” Tableau.”

Tableau: Have you worked on many joint solution deployments?Fawad Asrar Qureshi, Product Manager, EMEA: I've worked with many customers on Tableau and Teradata deployments. So the thing that the customers point out as the biggest trait of Tableau is its intuitiveness. And the ease of use and how quickly I learn this tool and be up to speed and start to work on the data. So the only prerequisite as described by the customer is that you only need to know about what the data is, and Tableau will take care of the rest.

I've worked with many customers on Tableau and Teradata deployments. The thing that the customers point out as the biggest trait of Tableau is its intuitiveness. And the ease of use and how quickly you can learn this tool and be up to speed and start to work on the data. So the only prerequisite is that you only need to know about what the data is, and Tableau will take care of the rest.

Fawad Asrar Qureshi,Product Manager, EMEA

Tableau: You’re a big data expert—what is important to understand about big data?Qureshi: When you're talking about big data, big data type of data sources and big data type of projects, the idea is to fail quickly. So you want to test out as many ideas as possible. So if you want to figure out if there's a new insight you want to find in the data, that's a hard thing to do if you don't have a data visualization tool which can answer your questions quickly communicating with the underlying data platform.

And Tableau's ability is to provide visual analytics at the speed of thought works with the underlying platforms and it pushes all the queries down to the underlying system. So in that way the data processing is taken care of by the Teradata platforms and the visualization piece is taken care of by Tableau. And in this way they perfectly complement each other since they are the best in their respective areas. So it is very, very complementing and is a powerful offering for the customers. So Tableau as a partner, yeah, it is a very dynamic company to work with.

Tableau: How does Tableau fit into Teradata’s overall strategy?Qureshi: Teradata has a best of breed strategy. So we will work with the best solutions in each and every domain. And we give the customers the option of picking the right tool. And it's not just compatibility or just making sure they work. It's really engineering level certification, so, you know, where the engineering teams sit together and work on a joint roadmap and to make sure that, you know, the joint offer delivers maximum value to the end customers. It became quite apparent so that we had to work with them, and come up with a joint offer which delivers maximum value for our clients.

Tableau: With what industries are you introducing Tableau?Qureshi: Tableau and Teradata are being used in a number of different industries. So, you know, they range from telecoms, finance, retail, oil and gas, even government agencies.

Without going into the specifics of the numbers, Teradata and Tableau have actually, you know, helped our clients in a number of ways. So it has reduced the time to delivery of projects, because the clients can actually move towards an agile approach of BI project deliveries and they are able to find new insights very, very quickly.

Tableau: What kinds of data are you using?Qureshi: With a unified data architecture we have three platforms. We have the Hadoop appliance, we have the AstraData distributed appliance, which runs MapReduce and SQL all in one engine. Then we have the Teradata data warehouse appliances, which we have been delivering for more than 30 years. So all these can store the data at massive scale and you can make use of the data through the use of different analytical tools.

Tableau: Can you say anything else about how Teradata and Tableau work together?Qureshi: These two technologies, Teradata and Tableau, complement each other very well. Teradata scales linearly and can store massive volumes of data while delivering consistent performance on the queries, whereas Tableau allows the business user to think about only the business problem at hand and keep querying the data as they would like it to be displayed. And this makes these two technologies very complementing to each other and delivering the maximum value for the end business users.